Heidi Blake - From Russia with Blood

As he strode through the grand entrance of the Logovaz Club on this biting January morning, the businessman’s prized possession—his hulking mobile telephone—began trilling insistently. The caller was Logovaz’s general director, Yuli Dubov. He was overseeing the company’s latest grand expansion, and he had hit upon a major problem.

The city government of St. Petersburg was refusing to issue the papers confirming that Logovaz owned the site of the new flagship service center it was building for Mercedes in Russia’s second city. Opening without the right documentation would make the center a sitting duck for extortion by the city’s notoriously corrupt officials and marauding criminal gangs, and the date when the German car giant was expecting it to be up and running was fast approaching.

“Our people can’t do anything,” Dubov said, sounding desperate. “And this could really damage our relationship with Stuttgart.”

Berezovsky knew exactly what needed to be done. “You’ll have to go and see Putin,” he said.

Dubov was mystified. “Who the hell is Putin?”

As the limousine swept through the snow-cloaked St. Petersburg streets, past the golden domes of the Kazan Cathedral and the gleaming columns of the Winter Palace, Dubov reflected on what little he knew about the man he was getting ready to meet for lunch. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Berezovsky had explained, was the city’s deputy mayor—an unfailingly loyal but ever more powerful lieutenant to the aging Anatoly Sobchak—and these days he was the one who ran the show.

“He’s a really good person,” Berezovsky had told him. “And he’s really in charge of what’s going on in the city.” Dubov had entertained many politicians in Moscow as Logovaz built its business, and he was in little doubt about how the meeting with Putin would go. He would have to spend hours plying the deputy mayor with delicious food, fabulous wine, and plenty of vodka before they turned to the problem at hand and what it would cost to solve it.

As he strode into the restaurant, brushing the snow from his coat sleeves, Dubov saw two men in gray suits seated in the lounge. They rose as he entered. The smaller man, who introduced himself as Vladimir Vladimirovich, was slight and mousy with a cautious manner to match his sober tie. If you put him next to the wall, Dubov thought, you wouldn’t see the difference. The other man, who was introduced as Putin’s secretary, Igor Sechin, stood to attention at his side with an attaché case in one hand and a large mobile telephone in the other. Dubov thought them an oddly austere pair.

The two men declined a drink and stayed standing. With ten minutes to go until the table was ready, Dubov ventured a few comments about the weather in St. Petersburg, which, he felt it fair to say, was dirty. When those efforts at conversation met with stony silence, and no other topics appeared to be forthcoming, he decided to be done with it and plunge ahead with his request.

Logovaz had already paid for the plot of land where its new Mercedes center would be situated, and the building works were almost complete, he explained. But the city government was withholding the documentation granting the company the formal rights to the site. Could the deputy mayor do anything to help?

“Give me one minute,” said Putin, taking the telephone from Sechin, extending the antenna, and walking smartly to the window.

When he returned, he handed the phone back to Sechin and turned to Dubov. “The documents will be finalized and given to you as soon as you come to the office,” he said, reaching for his coat. “Goodbye.”

“What about lunch?” asked Dubov, taken aback.

“I thought I was coming here for lunch,” said Putin. “But it turned out I came here to resolve some of your business problems. Since I have done that, there is no need to spend time eating and talking.” With that, he and Sechin spun on their heels and stalked out, leaving Dubov staring after them in blank astonishment.

“This is a very strange guy you introduced me to,” he told Berezovsky back at the Logovaz Club in Moscow. What sort of politician declines a free lunch in exchange for a favor?

Berezovsky smiled. “Yes,” he said. “He is very special.”

A few years earlier, when he first began importing cars into St. Petersburg, Berezovsky had approached Putin, then a young functionary in Sobchak’s administration, and offered him a small inducement to help smooth over a few administrative matters. To his astonishment, Putin declined. He was, to Berezovsky’s knowledge, the first Russian official who didn’t take bribes. The experience had made a huge impression, and since then he had made a point of swinging by Putin’s office for a chat whenever he was in St. Petersburg. It was a useful alliance for Berezovsky when he needed to pull strings in Russia’s second city. And the reach of Putin’s influence didn’t seem to stop at city hall.

The punctilious young deputy mayor appeared to hold significant sway over the powerful organized crime groups that terrorized St. Petersburg. The Russian mafia had mushroomed into the vacuum created by the implosion of the Soviet security state, and the car industry was a particularly gangster-infested line of business, with hoodlums using brute force to steal whole consignments of new cars and seize control of lucrative dealerships. That made opening a shiny new Mercedes service center in the heart of St. Petersburg a perilous game. But Putin had sufficient status with the city’s most powerful mafia group—the Tambovskaya Bratva, known as the Tambov gang—to guarantee the security of Berezovsky’s operations as well as help smooth over bureaucratic glitches with the city government.

Berezovsky was sure Putin was special. How else could he have risen up through the corrupt ranks of St. Petersburg officialdom and acquired such standing with the mob without tarnishing his seemingly spotless morals? Why else would he be so helpful without wanting anything in return?

But the fact was that Putin did want something very much indeed, and Berezovsky was uniquely well placed to give it him. It just wasn’t a free lunch or a car or a bundle of money. It was the keys to the Kremlin.

Boris Yeltsin had seen off the Communists and come to power in 1991 promising to propel the Russian people out of the darkness of their totalitarian past into the dawn of a free and prosperous future. His strategy, under the tutelage of the World Bank and other bastions of Western capitalism, was to submit the country’s creaking socialist economy to a radical regimen of capitalist shock therapy involving the sudden withdrawal of price controls and the mass privatization of state assets. That, coupled with a decision to plug the state’s budget deficit by printing reams of rubles, prompted a prolonged period of hyperinflation that wiped out savings and plunged ordinary Russians into abject poverty. But for a fortunate few, the shock to the Soviet system shook loose a windfall of unimaginable riches.

Berezovsky had won favor with the first freely elected president of Russia by bankrolling the publication of his memoir. Notes of a President was a dismal commercial flop when it hit the market, in 1993, but Berezovsky made sure the author was handsomely paid, pleasing the vainglorious Yeltsin sufficiently to gain admittance to his private circle. From there, Berezovsky made a beeline for the president’s influential daughter, Tatiana, lavishing her with gifts and largesse until the pair became fast friends. So it was that he became a central member of what came to be known as the Kremlin Family, the intimate group who counseled Yeltsin as he dismantled the Soviet state apparatus and carved up its assets. The businessman could hardly have profited more abundantly from his coveted place in the president’s court.